how we can know it

by uzwi

All journeys are enchanted.

It isn’t so much that the landscape distracts you, as that something about the motion of the train — something about the very idea of constant, rushing, forward movement — makes you restless and slow to settle to anything. You read a few pages of a book and look out at some swans on a canal. A newspaper opened suddenly just down the carriage sounds like rain spattering on the window. Another chapter and you make your way down to the buffet or the lavatory. Between each event a rev- erie pours itself, as seamless as golden syrup, as smooth as the motion of the train. You wonder what the weather will be like in Leeds or Newcastle, turn to the Independent to find out, read: “The world economy is likely to remain subdued.”

Looking up from these words to a landscape of hedges and ponds, copses and little embankments, the Ephebe sees with amazement a strange vehicle bounding along beside the railway line.

In a long, complex frame of metal tubing, suspended on four tractor wheels, are cradled: an engine wrapped round with copper pipes and sheaves of old electrical wiring; clusters of what seem to be household butane gas bottles; and, well to the rear, the padded seat of some old-fashioned military jet, into which is strapped a man. Gouts of earth and water spray up from its enormous wheels. From time to time this whole machine seems to be consumed by a kind of radiant discharge, through which its driver or pilot can be seen helplessly or furiously waving his arms.

Is he a prisoner of his vehicle? Or does he prefer to drive on the edge of disaster like this? He is a wasted old man. When it can be seen, his face runs the gamut of expression, wild with fear one moment, laughing with excitement the next. His long gray hair blows back in the slipstream. His lips contort. He has fastened himself into a tight brown leather suit along the arms and legs of which run clusters of Neoprene tubing. Out of these at intervals erupt thick colored fluids, which splatter over his chest or into his eyes. Though he blinks furiously, he suffers the indignity without harm: but wherever the machine is touched it blackens and smokes briefly, and lightning writhes along its chassis members.

One huge wheel flies off suddenly into the air. The old man claps his hands to his face. At that moment the train enters a tunnel, and the Ephebe can see only himself, reflected in the window.

If the appearance of the machine has filled him with astonishment, its disappearance leaves him with a curious mixture of elation and anger he can neither understand nor resolve. By the time he is able to unclench his hands and wipe his forehead, the train has left the tunnel for open plowland across which spills a tranquil evening light. Wrestling desper- ately with one another, the old man and his machine have passed back into the dimension from which they came, where they leap and bucket and belly their way forever through rural England, scattering clods of earth, steam, small bushes and dead animals. But in the palm of the Ephebe’s hand remains a small, intricately machined metal item, melted at one end to slag.

This he brings home with him. For months it remains warm to the touch, as if it had only lately been thrown out of the hearth of the heart.

–from “The Horse of Iron & How We Can Know It & Be Changed By It Forever”, 1988.

7 Comments to “how we can know it”

This is one of my favorite of your short stories. This passage has always stood out to me:

“Little earthy lanes and banks become secret entryways into the warm fields and bemused emotional states of childhood, when in a kind of excited fatigue you watch your own hand come closer and closer to the dry gray wood of an old gate, and find yourself unable for a second to context the one by the other or find a single context – unless it is something as huge and general as “the world” – which will accept both. In the end you are able to understand only the intense existence, the photographic actuality of such objects”

When i first came upon the echoes of this in Light, i wanted to read more of it/more like it. When eventually i did, i was, of course, terrified. Lovely stuff.
These fragments which to the reader might seem to be connected or to partake of a common source – does the author see them as a continuum (not in any worldbuilding sense, god forbid) or are they mere building blocks to him, segmented by their place in the bibliography?
In other words, would you encourage the reader to hop and skip all over your oeuvre, assembling a kind of shadow narrative of their own?

There’s no master-narrative in that Moorcockian sense; but neither are they just building blocks & occasionally they slip into some fleeting but half-meaningful relationship. As often as not that’s also an indication that structural expectations are about to be confounded/repurposed/whatever. Or you could see them as ghosts, bits of broken narrative DNA drifting about in a viral manner, like the broken code drifting about in the site in Nova Swing.

There was some discussion of this–as “versioning” –at the Warwick U conference last year; the Gylphi book of the conference will contain a paper on it.